Facebook has officially announced that it has opened a data center in Virginia to expand its infrastructure, and adds some details on the company's growth and how it will synch profile data between its facilities. Facebook has leased 10,000 square feet of space in a new Ashburn, Va. facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT).
Facebook engineer Jason Sobel said the service has been adding nearly two million users per week, and "the load on our thousands of servers continues to increase at a pretty astounding rate." Here's an excerpt from Jason's blog item:
A few weeks ago we reached full capacity in our California datacenters. In the past we handled this problem by purchasing a few dozen servers, hooking them up, and getting on with our lives, but this time we didn't have it so easy. We'd actually run out of space in our datacenters for new machines. Fortunately we saw this problem coming a long time ago and started work on a new datacenter in Virginia.
Sobel also calls the Ashburn facility a "great first step" and hints that there's additional data center expansion ahead: "Going forward we have lots of exciting plans to expand our infrastructure and improve performance so no user ever has to sit around waiting for a page to load."
